Pastel on Supertooth paper     

48 x 34cm    

Original SOLD

Red pandas mainly eat bamboo leaves, and they eat a lot of it! This is because they only digest around 24 percent of the bamboo they eat. That means they need to eat 20 to 30 percent of their body weight each day—about 2 to 4 pounds (1 to 2 kilograms) of bamboo shoots and leaves. They also eat grass, fruit, eggs, insects or small animals and birds. Like giant pandas, red pandas have a pseudo-thumb: an enlarged, modified wrist bone they use for grabbing bamboo stems and tree branches. It was once thought that it must be an adaptation to eating bamboo, but the red panda's more carnivorous ancestors had this feature as well. According to a 2006 study, what happened was "one of the most dramatic cases of convergent evolution among vertebrates." In actual fact red pandas and giant pandas are not directly related.